In the beginning, a small team of techie crypto writers joined forces around a shared vision to publish books on blockchain. Digital assets unlocking deep knowledge have an uncharted course in today’s market with challenges from fan buy-in to multi-contributor royalty management. This team set out to face these challenges head-on.
The first NFTBook was minted in January of 2021. It was a basic proof-of-concept, but succeeded in existing 100% on blockchain. The PDF book reader was enclosed in a HTML page hosted by IPFS; the decentralized cloud file storage for the Web3 Metaverse. This meant on-chain books were real: no centralized host to disappear, no server to support.
In the weeks to follow, WIP Publishing, a crypto-first book publishing house that aimed to help fellow authors mint their books as NFTs began to take shape. Supported by a core of dedicated multidisciplinary enthusiasts, the community began to blossom. By fall of 2021, there were over a dozen custom-created NFTBooks in the “Genesis” OpenSea collection.
As time went on this team continued making improvements to the NFTBook reading experience to make their books more affordable and accessible than ever before.
- Ethereum + Polygon compatible contracts
- Embedded PDF reader on OpenSea
PageDAO grew from the community of writers that had been created, sharing vision, brainstorming solutions, and connecting with other active creators in the crypto space. The governance token $PAGE was given to partner communities that shared an interest in books-on-chain and several projects and events were spawned.
On example of an innovative collaboration was the highly anticipated “Mask of Ganymede” NFTBook released in September of 2021 in collaboration with MaskDAO featuring all new tech:
- Mint-on-demand ERC-721 NFTs on Ethereum
- Ebook + Audiobook reader
- Gated access for token holders
- Print-on-Demand
Today we have an open NFTBook minter for anyone with a PageDAO Member Card to mint their own books. All books are open and free to read in the ReadMe Books collection on OpenSea.
The NFTBook minter provides the simplest single page, ultra-low-cost, and zero censorship mechanism to put books on chain. The reader experience is intuitive and seamless, embeddable and immutable. The ease of creation has led to 38 books being created on-chain in a month. With price and supply in the creator’s hands it’s interesting to note that most authors opted to keep their work affordable. The average price is around $25 USD, and even with low pricing, over a quarter ETH of books have been sold.
PageDAO users have documented their mental health journeys, shared their short fiction, written manifestos, republished an immutable Gutenberg Bible, waxed poetic, and launched digital literary experiments that range from blog-post to novels.
What's next for PageDAO?
- Growing the partnership with Scholar & Scribe on Hive: exploring new tech and avenues to help talented writers find meaningful work or platforms for their craft.
- Expanding the PageDAO tech stack to the interchain protocol
- Exploring developing an L1 chain to support web3 publishing aspirations across all of web3
Getting involved
Join the PageDAO discord community of writers, readers and creatives working to bring literature to blockchain.
$100 PAGE is required for full DAO membership (available on Uniswap).
